


Between Two Trees

by mytimehaspassed



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, M/M, Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:15:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Chris Keller dies, it’s an accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Two Trees

**BETWEEN TWO TREES**  
OZ  
Beecher/Keller; Keller/OMCs  
 **WARNINGS** : Hell!AU set during season six; multiple character deaths

  
When Chris Keller dies, it’s an accident. For every precaution he took in Oz, for every side glance and hidden shank and every time he held Toby close and kissed him with liar’s lips and told him that he would always keep him safe, Chris takes one wrong, drunken step out onto the road and becomes blood and broken bones on the pavement.

Nobody important is even there to witness him dying in another color other than orange.

He breathes and it’s hard and he remembers what it felt like when he wiped out on his bike before Oz, before Toby and Schillinger and before he was let out on a technicality that even that fuck from the FBI couldn’t dispute, Chris’ smirk over Bryce Tibit’s dimpled photograph, the two other boys stacked underneath. He breathes and it hurts and the car that hit him is jerking to a stop and the girl that was driving steps out and she has tears in her eyes and Chris wants to laugh until he can’t anymore.

“Are you okay?” She says, but her face is blurred above his, and Chris imagines Toby, still in Oz, still in Emerald City, burning with hatred and envy, those calls he never made, those visits he never took, and then he’s there, smiling with one lift of his mouth, and his hair is shaved and his teeth are white and he says something that Chris doesn’t catch.

Chris wants to ask him what he said, but he coughs up something red, and there’s this rattle in his chest that hurts like a motherfucker.

And Toby says it again, “You gonna wait for me?”

And Chris still can’t talk, but he wants to say, What?

And Toby rolls his eyes and says, “You gonna wait for me down there, you fuck?”

And Chris laughs again and again and wants to say, I thought God couldn’t keep us out of Heaven, but there’s something hard pressing on his chest, even though there’s only air above him.

And Toby flickers back to the girl again, asking, “Mister? Mister?”

The girl with red hair and freckles on her nose, and God but she can’t be more than sixteen. She frowns and then she’s Toby again, his lips curved into a smile. He leans down close enough to kiss and says, “Heaven can’t handle us, baby,” and Chris couldn’t agree more.

He laughs one more time, and then dies.

***

And it’s not hot like in all the stories; it’s not layers of fire and brimstone or red devils with pitchforks, but an office. An office with a man at a reception desk who looks at Chris with a bored expression on his face, stamping sheets of paper with a rubber stamp of approval. Or disproval, Chris can’t tell.

He says, “Door to the right,” with a nod of his head to a long line of people that look like they’ve been waiting in long lines their whole life.

“Listen,” Chris says, before he can stop himself. Somewhere between now and Euclid Avenue, he’s been changed out of the clothes he died in, but he can still feel the sticky hot wound on his head like it never closed. “I’m supposed to wait for someone down here.”

The guy doesn’t even put down his stamp. “Door to the right.” He waves his hand with an air of dismissal.

Chris gives him the finger.

***

Hell for Chris is a studio apartment above a bookstore that shelves only old, torn copies of harlequin romance novels. He gets a job working part time in a mechanics shop and comes home with grease in the creases of his skin and takes bubble baths and drinks red wine and reads paperbacks with Fabio on the cover. According to the bookstore owner, who died by the hands of his wife, the knife scar on his neck pale and thin in the sun, it’s supposed to teach him some kind of new age, self-help bullshit about opening up and letting himself get in touch with his feminine side.

The bookstore owner reminds him of Sister Pete, if Sister Pete was a middle-aged, overweight yuppie who got caught fucking the babysitter.

Chris runs into a few guys he knew from Oz, a couple of the Aryans who found out that redemption had nothing to do with the purity of skin color, and some of the fucks from Unit B, looking tired and unlucky.

He doesn’t find Beecher.

Doesn’t find Schillinger, either, but that’s just as well, because Chris isn’t sure how the death thing works in Hell, and if you can kill somebody who’s already dead or not.

He runs into people he’s known throughout his life, the second grade teacher who got caught fondling one of the boys in his class, the woman who ran the boarding school he was sent to at thirteen, the one who was skimming the till and setting up charity drives where the money never made it to charity.

He runs into people he never met, but wanted to, Jeffrey Dahmer, who is quiet and flirtatious, smiling when Chris tells him about the boys he never killed (saying, “Really? You didn’t want to just see what it was like?”

And Chris asking, “What?” His mouth dry and ready to be used.

And Jeffrey saying, “What it was like to kill them,” his hand on his chest and his mouth in an excited grin and Chris can feel the press of his jeans growing tighter and he smirks and says, with his liar’s lips, “I’ve never killed anybody,” and Jeffrey swallows the lie and his eyes are bright when he laughs.

“They’re yours forever,” he says, meaning the boys.

“It’s amazing,” he says.

And Chris knows he’s in the right place.), Richard Loeb, who might be pining after Leopold (maybe as much as Chris is pining after Toby, maybe less), but never acts like he gives a damn (“You want to know what the best part was?” He says and Chris is already bored with this self-indulgent train of thought, but humors him, anyway, because he’d rather have his mouth full than get into an argument. Loeb strokes Chris’ hair and Chris moves his mouth in a way that makes Loeb inhale in sharp, tiny breaths.

“The best part,” he says, and his grip gets hard, and harder, Chris’ hair tearing from his skull. “Was the look on Bobby’s face.”

And Chris moves his tongue and Loeb goes quiet.).

***

He catches sight of Ryan O’Reily once, and he opens his mouth to ask him about Toby, but in one blink, he’s gone. The ones who have been here for longer than Chris, they call that a miracle, somebody who was dead for long enough to feel the wave of Hell against their cheeks, and then was brought back to life by God or an EMT or somebody with power.

Chris calls it a fuck up, because if anybody deserves to be reading trashy romance novels with him, it’s Ryan O’fucking Reily, who found love in Oz the same way Chris did, fighting to keep it safe inside. Fighting to keep it, even if it was never theirs to keep in the first place.

***

The radio at the shop plays soft jazz renditions of every one of Chris’ favorite songs. He cleans the dirt under his fingernails and hums along to the saxophone solo in “Back in Black.” He fixes carburetors and belts and re-attaches door handles and checks tire pressures and rubs his hands on dirty rags, but never quite feels clean enough.

His boss has two white lines on his wrists, stopping at the crooks of his elbows, and he eats deli sandwiches like they’re going out of style. “I fucked Lizzie Borden against that bench,” he had said on Chris’ first day, his crooked finger pointing to the bench Chris was leaning on. “She was a real bitch and a half.”

Chris raised one eyebrow.

“Sucked me like a hose, though. That dyke knows how to give head, I’ll give her that.” And then he had smiled. “What about you?”

And Chris had punched him in the mouth.

***

The sixteen inch TV in Chris’ apartment shows nothing but staticky re-runs of General Hospital. He pictures Toby with a stethoscope around his neck and jerks off with long, slow pulls. In his fantasy, Toby smiles and there’s blood on his teeth.

Chris comes on the fourteenth pull.

***

Chris waits for two years, five months, and sixteen days.

Toby knocks on his door on the seventeenth day, and Chris tugs him inside before he can even say hello. Toby kisses back, even though he shouldn’t, kisses back even though he promised himself he wouldn’t, even though Chris had only been gone for two months, two months of Toby feeling like he should be happy because he was finally free, but falling short of everything that wasn’t the odd ache in his heart.

Toby wants to tell Chris this, all of this, everything, but doesn’t.

Toby says, “I missed you.”

And Chris doesn’t say anything at all.

***

Toby was shanked in the cafeteria by a right-wing nutjob who caught sight of Toby sucking cock in his cell one night. There was no reason for it, and Chris traces the scar above Toby’s heart with his mouth in a white line.

He says, “I’ll kill the motherfucker.”

Toby laughs. And then he shrugs. “McManus held my hand as I was dying. It was like Augustus Hill all over again.”

“McManus won’t do anything to him, and you know it.” And what he really wants to say is, I wasn’t there to protect you.

“It doesn’t matter now.” And what Toby really wants to say is, I know.

Chris puts his mouth on Toby’s scar, kisses it gently. “It matters to me,” he says, and his voice is a whisper.

Toby lifts his hand to the back of Chris’ neck, stroking two fingers down the nape, up and down, up and down. “I know.”

And Chris says, “You matter to me, Toby.”

And Toby says, “I know.”

***

Chris borrows a car from the shop and takes Toby to the sea. The water is blood red and the breeze is sharp and cold and goes through their tee shirts like paper, but neither of them mind very much. They fuck in the car, Chris against Toby’s back and Toby’s face pressed hard against the leather seats, his hand reaching out for Chris’ hand, and gasping when they connect, Chris’ fingers sliding in between Toby’s.

Toby keeps murmuring Chris’ name like it’s been years since he’s see him, felt him, Chris’ mouth on the back of Toby’s neck, his tongue finding Toby’s spine through his skin.

The waves break against the shore and Chris can’t hear anything but the noise in his ear, the waves swelling and breaking and breaking and breaking, the waves swelling and the sand turning as red as the water, spreading just like all the blood spilled in Oz.

Toby says, “I’ve missed this,” but it’s only been two months for him, longer if you count Chris leaving Oz without ever looking back, his overturned sentence and Toby standing at the bars of Em City with his hands reaching through and Chris never reaching back, even if his hands hurt to do so, even if his heart was growing sharp inside him. Toby and the look in his eyes like oh how he wanted to cry at Chris’ rejection and Chris letting the words come out of his mouth, the words he never wanted to say to Toby, never wanted to let pass his lips, the words he would regret for two years, five months, and sixteen days.

Chris had said, “Get a fucking life, Beecher.”

And Toby had turned away, just so Chris wouldn’t see how he had broken his heart.

Nobody knows why Chris does the things he does, least of all Chris, so Toby never asks why, his mouth on Chris’, his mouth and his hands and the way he wants to whisper I Love You and never say anything else. Toby says, “I’ve missed you.”

And Chris says, “I’ve missed you, too,” the water breaking in his ears, crashing against the bloody sand, crashing and crashing and crashing.

And Chris says, “I love you, Toby.”

And Toby says it back.

***

Chris knows that they deserve Hell, both of them here forever with menial jobs and a shitty, broken down apartment above a dirty bookstore, loving each other because with what they went through, they would never be able to love anybody else.

But he also knows that Hell deserves them just as much.


End file.
